Category Archives: Makers

Maria’s Wool Forrest project is an outlet for hand needle felted wool toys and a fantastic example of the breadth of makers you’ll see at the Maker Faire. For those not in the know, needle felting is a fibre art craft that uses barbed felting needles to sculpt fibres into new shapes without weaving. As one might expect of an Australian maker, Maria works with 100% sheep’s wool.

Maria’s toys feature natural and traditional themes such as dolls and farm animals. There’s also an otherworldly strand that runs through her work with fairies and gnomes taking up position in forest or vegetable garden settings. In this way Maria revives a long tradition of home made toys.

Come along to the Maker Faire and see some of Maria’s Wool Forrest toys and find out more about how she creates these beautiful hand made all-natural toys. You can also see more of Maria’s work at her Needle Felted Toys blog.

In this new series of posts we’ll be featuring some of the makers that you can expect to see at the Maker Faire. Since no maker event would be complete without some awesome flashing lights, first up is Andee and his stunning 8 x 8 x 8 RGB LED cube. That’s 512 full-colour LEDs!

“It was almost like I got possessed by the spirit of the LED cube. There’s just ‘something’ about them,” he said. Andee started out assembling Jaycar kits and had never designed a circuit or written any microprocessor code before the LED cube. Not a bad first effort we reckon!

“Initially I did consider just buying a kit, but after reading as much as I could find about LED cubes and doing a few microcontroller “tutorials”, I decided it might be fun to finally try something like this for my self,” Andee told us. Incredibly he says that the intricate lattice of wiring for the LEDs was the “easy part” but admitted that it “took a lot of time and a lot of patience.”

“It’s all the late nights of hacking at the code trying to get the thing to work, that was far more challenging and at times far more frustrating,” he said, adding that that there never was any commercial reason for the project. “I did it purely for the fun and achievement of it.”

If that doesn’t sum up the maker spirit then what does? Head over to Andee’s site to see much more detail on the cube and his other projects. You will of course have the chance to see the cube in action at the Faire. Can’t wait? Click the break for a video tease.

This update confirms that we’ve started the process of vetting Maker applications. If you’ve submitted one via our web form, you will be hearing from us via email in the next few days. We’ll also be doing some profiling of makers on the blog and other parts of the website.

If you haven’t submitted a Maker application yet, there’s still time but we’d encourage you to do so quickly. This will give you much more option in terms of the available ways in which you can be involved, and will help us a lot with planning and logistics.

Remember that as a maker with scheduled involvement in the event, you don’t need to book an attendee ticket: your involvement gives you entry to Maker Faire. So, if you’re a maker currently wait listed for an attendee ticket, please consider submitting a Maker proposal and be involved in the event directly. There are many ways that you can be involved, including:

having an exhibitors booth

running a workshop or activity

giving a prepared talk, demonstration or performance

hosting a discussion group

This gives you the ability to commit to as little as say a 5 minute lightning talk, through to manning your own exhibitors booth for the day.

Note also that we’ll be making the announcement of the venue and opening the ticket registration process tomorrow, Friday 16th December 2011.

Makers, please provide as much information as you can on the entry form to help us understand your requirements and to balance the event with a good range of projects. If you’d like to submit more than one proposal — for example, an exhibit table and a workshop or presentation — it would help us out if you could submit one entry form per proposal.

Please have a read of the content on the Maker page to better understand some of things we’re looking for from submissions.

You’ll also have a number of other channels beside this website from which you can get updates: Twitter, Google Plus, a mailing list and possibly even Facebook. We’ll follow up with an official post about those channels soon.

We’re really excited about hosting this event on Saturday January 14th, 2012, and we’d love you to be part of it. Mark the date in your calendar now, and drop by regularly over the next few weeks to see how things are shaping up!